[sudo-discuss] cuddling it

[rachel lyra hospodar]

So let's say a hypothetical person A says something that offends person B.
Person C sees this happen, and from being acquainted with both persons
recognizes that what is happening is not rooted in negative intent.

Person B indicates they are offended. Person A doubles down on the
offensive behavior. Person B is double down offended.

Person C says to person A: hey, you are making B really upset, I am
assuming you don't want that, and I don't think that's your intent, so
here's why that's valid and relevant.

Person A: well now I'm upset! At you, person C!

Ok.

When I say defensive, I mean this definition from freedictionary:
a. Intended to withstand or deter aggression or attack: a defensive weapons
system; defensive behavior. b. Defensive attitude.

My assertion here is that your behavioral & linguistic response patterns
are consistent with someone who is countering an attack when you are not,
in fact, being attacked.  This stance, IME, makes it difficult to listen &
grok.

I am not saying that 'people' should only respond to feedback by silently
assenting. I am suggesting that you might sometimes listen without rebuttal
being your automatic response.

I am attempting to explain and illuminate why someone (me, in this case. I
haven't talked directly with netdiva about her feelings on this) is so
offended by what you are saying or doing, that explanation doesn't help.
Offense is subjective and it's impossible to tell someone that they haven't
been offended.  If you receive feedback that you are being grossly
offensive, *if you care about your relationships with the offended
individuals*, it's good to pause and think about how and why, rather than
argue that you haven't been. A good response is questions, although then
it's important to note that some people are at the receiving end of grossly
offensive behavior on the daily and if we took every chance as an
educational one, the amount of explanation needed would be quite
exhausting.  Explaining is hard, especially when the person with whom you
are speaking displays behavior patterns where they seem to be countering or
defending against your ideas instead of listening to them and attempting to
understand them.

It's important to note that this is not a free speech issue. We are all
free to say whatever we want, including you, Anthony. I am not the police,
and bear no authority.  The assumption made here, by me, is that you might
care about the effect what you are saying has on members of your community.
Again, I'll repeat that you can say whatever you want. The people around
you are affected by what you say, and may say things in response, as they
are also allowed to do.  Nobody is telling anyone they can't do anything.
They are simply suggesting you might care about their feelings, and your
impact thereon.  It's a little scary to me that this suggestion makes you
feel as though your liberties are curtailed.

R.
On May 5, 2013 2:10 PM, "Anthony Di Franco" <di.franco at aya.yale.edu> wrote:

> Rachel, I've had a bit more time to reflect on what you wrote, and while I
> don't have anything to add about the immediate question beyond what I said
> yesterday, I'd like to talk about some of the broader context you brought
> up in your reply and the more general issues involved.
>
> The first thing is that I am primarily viewing what we are trying to do as
> having a discussion, so it seems to me that when there are
> misunderstandings that is exactly when we should be having more discussion
> to clarify what we are trying to say and find out effective ways to say it,
> not less. Meanwhile, you are using the terms of some sort of power struggle
> where I am being attacked and defending myself and allegiances are forming
> and shifting around the patterns of conflict. I do not see a power struggle
> but rather a community trying to communicate and communication depends on
> shared understanding among senders and recipients of symbols and how to use
> them to convey meaning. Where this is not immediately clear, clarifying it
> explicitly seems the most direct way to move towards better mutual
> understanding. I hope this can be reconciled with your own views and I
> welcome further discussion on this.
>
> Within the attacking and defending point of view, I am also uncomfortable
> with some things. To speak of attacking and defending and also then to say
> that the subject of the attack should *stop defending* reminds me too much
> of the revolting cries of "stop resisting" from police - I could certainly
> never meditate on such an ugly phrase and I find the suggestion grotesque.
> It's something I've heard while authoritarian thugs victimize people who
> are not resisting but only perhaps trying to maintain their safety and
> dignity under an uninvited attack, perhaps not even that, and one way the
> phrase is used is as a disingenuous way of framing the situation so that
> later, biased interpretations of what happened will have something to latch
> onto. I am glad we have much less at stake in our interactions here than in
> those situations but I still really don't like to see us internalizing that
> logic in how we handle communications in our group.
>
> There is another aspect of this I am uncomfortable with, which is the idea
> that people should respond to feedback only by silently assenting. This
> reminds me too much of other situations where people, sometimes myself,
> were supposed to be seen and not heard, and it deprives people of agency
> over and responsibility for what they do by expecting them to let others
> determine their behavior unilaterally. I am happy to take feedback and,
> generally, I hope you can trust people to act on feedback appropriately
> rather than trying to short-circuit their agency. The more informative
> feedback is, then, the better, and it should contain information people can
> use themselves to evaluate what they are doing the way others do so they
> can figure out how to accommodate everyone's needs. When feedback consist
> simply of naked statements it is too much like trolling in the small or
> gaslighting in the large, and especially then, amounts to an insidious way
> to deprive people of agency by conditioning them to fear unpredictable pain
> when they exercise agency, and has a chilling effect. In general, the idea
> that certain people are less able than others to handle the
> responsibilities of being human, and so they should have their behaviors
> dictated to them unilaterally by others, is a key to justifying many
> regimes of oppression, especially modern ones, and because of that I am
> very uncomfortable when I see any example of that logic being internalized
> in our group dynamics.
>
> I don't know what passed between you and Eddan involving trump cards but
> if the card game analogy really is apt then it may be a sign of
> trivializing the question of safe space by saying that certain people's
> concerns trump other people's concerns, based not on the concerns
> themselves, but only on who is raising the concerns. Both are important. I
> have heard some justifications for 'trumping' as I understand it that
> remind me of the debate around the Oscar Grant case. There, defenders of
> Mehserle's conduct claimed that police should be the judges of what
> legitimate police use of force is because they have special training and
> experience that give them a uniquely relevant perspective on what violence
> is justified and what demands of compliance they can legitimately make of
> people. Another justification I heard was that police are especially
> vulnerable due to the danger inherent in their duties and so things should
> be biased heavily towards a presumption of legitimacy when they use
> violence or demand compliance. To me both these justifications seem
> problematic because they create a class that can coerce others without
> accountability and can unilaterally force standards of conduct on others. I
> am happy that there is much less at stake among us here than there is in
> cases of police brutality or Oscar Grant's case, and that there is no
> comparison other than this logic being used. But the logic that certain
> people's perspectives are uniquely relevant, or that their vulnerability
> gives them license to force things upon others unilaterally, is still a
> logic I don't think we should internalize among ourselves, because it
> produces unaccountable authoritarianism that can be exploited for
> unintended ends, and does not help with the ostensibly intended ones
> anyway. It results in us 'policing' ourselves in a way much too much like
> the way the cities are policed to the detriment of many people and of
> values we share.
>
> Finally, you mentioned the evening at Marina's apartment and I want to
> clarify my experience of what happened there. My 'aha' moment didn't have
> anything to do with the point you were trying to make - I can't even
> remember exactly what that point was, because it is so strongly
> overshadowed by my memory of how you treated me. You called me out for
> something that had passed between you and me in the middle of a social
> gathering among a mix of friends and strangers, none of whom were involved,
> which immediately put me in a very uncomfortable situation. Then, you
> dismissed my attempts to defer speaking to a more appropriate setting, and
> to open up a dialog with you where I shared my perspective. The only way
> out you gave me was to assent without comment to you. My 'aha' moment was
> when I realized that things between us had degenerated to that point; it
> was when I realized I was mistaken in trying to have a discussion because
> we were interacting like two territorial animals, or like a police
> interrogator and a suspect, and you were simply demanding a display of
> submission or contrition from me before you would let me slink off. While
> it felt degrading, I took the way out you offered to spare myself and the
> others in the room the experience of things continuing. I take the risk of
> sharing this openly with you now because I think we know each other much
> better than we did then and we would never again end up interacting like
> potentially hostile strangers passing in the night, or worse. I think we
> can and should and have been doing better, and overall it's best not to let
> a mistaken assumption about what I was thinking and how I felt influence an
> important discussion about how we treat one another in our community.
>
> I, like you, hope you can appreciate that I am taking the time to write
> this admittedly long-winded reply, not to suck the air out of the room,
> whatever that means, but to contribute to a discussion that moves us
> towards a better shared understanding of how to respect our shared values
> and towards more appreciation of one another's perspectives.
>
> Anthony
>
>
> On Sat, May 4, 2013 at 10:14 AM, rachel lyra hospodar <rachelyra at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> I am really sad about this whole thread.
>>
>> Anthony, I think I know you well enough to say that your intent here was
>> not to be offensive, but unfortunately... Here we are. I am responding to
>> the specific message below because it is the one that made me want to
>> unsubscribe from this mailing list and unassociate myself from this group.
>> Everything that came after, gah.
>>
>> Anti-oppression for the priveleged class, ie not being an unintentional
>> giant jerkface: if someone points out that you are offending or harming
>> them, they are not seeking an explanation, but a change in behavior.
>> Perhaps an apology or acknowledgement, even a query. If someone says 'i
>> think your POV is fucked up and harmful' please do not go on to elaborate
>> on your POV to them. Even if you think they don't get your amazing nuances.
>> Your amazing nuances are not always important, and part of 'oppression' is
>> that some peoples' nuances are always shoved in other people's faces.
>> Sometimes being a friend means keeping your opinion to your damn self.
>>
>> This relates to something that eddan has on occasion termed 'the trump
>> card'.  We are all individuals, and as such we ultimately need to keep our
>> own house in order. The trump card concept relates to safe spaces - as safe
>> as eddan might feel in a space, I'm not going to average it together with
>> my safety levels to achieve some sort of average safety rating. My safety
>> reading of a space will always, for me, trump eddan's, and while I am happy
>> if he feels safe it doesn't really matter to my safety level.
>>
>> The interesting thing about telling most people they are making you feel
>> unsafe, or that they are offending you, is that for some reason their
>> response is almost never 'gosh, whoops!'. It's more usually like what
>> happened here - a bunch of longwinded explanation that completely misses
>> the point, and then a perceived ally of the offender jumping in, also
>> talking a lot, and sucking all the air out of the room.  People always have
>> reasoning for why they did what they did. Requiring offended folks to read
>> about your reasoning for why you said what you said misses the point, and
>> to me makes this conversation read like you don't care if you were
>> offensive.
>>
>> It's deja vu to me that you are giving all this definition and
>> explanation around the terms you used. It seems identical to our debate
>> around the use of 'constable' and it is sad to me to see you take refuge in
>> the same pattern of defense. It doesn't matter about the etymological
>> history of a phrase. It doesn't. As fun as you may find it to think about,
>> the way things are *heard*, by others, NOW, is a trump card for many.
>>
>> Anthony, I hope you can understand that I have taken the time out of my
>> life to write this message in the hopes of helping you to modulate your
>> behavior to be less offensive. I am sure you remember the first time I
>> engaged with you on this topic, at Marina's house. Perhaps you'll remember
>> the aha moment when you *stopped defending* and simply accepted the input,
>> thanking me. Perhaps you'll find in that a sort of meditative place of
>> return.
>>
>> Good luck to you all. I enjoy many things about sudo community and am
>> sure I will stay connected in many ways.
>>
>> R.
>>  On May 3, 2013 3:05 PM, "Anthony Di Franco" <di.franco at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Doesn't the civilized psyche secretly crave the things it sets itself
>>> apart from and gives up and projects on its image of the noble savage
>>> though?
>>>
>>> Your description seems more like meditatively flowing through it.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 2:58 PM, netdiva <netdiva at sonic.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Here I was thinking "killing it" was just another example of
>>>> appropriation of african american vernacular by the mainstream.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 5/3/2013 2:46 PM, Leonid Kozhukh wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> "killing it" is a recently popular term to denote excellence and
>>>>> immense progress. it has a violent, forceful connotation.
>>>>>
>>>>> friends in the circus community - through empirical evidence - have
>>>>> established a belief that operating at the highest levels of talent
>>>>> requires mindfulness, awareness, and calm. thus, a better term, which they
>>>>> have started to playfully use, is "cuddling it."
>>>>>
>>>>> thought sudoers would appreciate this.
>>>>>
>>>>> cuddling it,
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> len
>>>>>
>>>>> founder, ligertail
>>>>> http://ligertail.com
>>>>>
>>>>>
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>>>
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>
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